Misleading astronomy

I do hate it when people hype astronomical events. If you’ve ever watched a meteor shower you know it doesn’t look like this! It’s cloudy here so I’m unlikely to see anything..

Some showers have a lot of meteors or meteorites (the ones that land).

I’ve commented on the post:

It won’t look like this. The Leonids radiate from the constellation Leo (the direction they come from, not the actual stars). They won’t look like blue fireballs, just thin fast streaks of light shooting through the night sky. Unless a large chunk of material falls through the atmosphere. But it’s worth looking up, usually after local midnight. You can really see some great shows if the weather is clear.

For info go to spaceweather.com or look up details at the BBC’s The sky at night TV programme.

Perseid meteor

It was about 11.40pm tonight in the UK. I was looking through my kitchen window looking west. I was ringing my sister to tell her the Perseid Meteor shower was due tonight, when I saw what I can only describe as a fireball flash by heading north west. Two seconds later, my sister who lives eighty miles away saw it too! It flew over her right shoulder and dissappeared. So it must have been travelling about 40 miles a second. Since then I’ve seen about four meteors (shooting stars). It’s clouded over now. But there should be about 150 an hour after local midnight! X